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Busy weekend

I’m back in the game! I was helping dad to film a singer/saxophone player on Friday morning for his promotional video, which was actually pretty good fun. The performer we were filming does swing covers of rock songs and other things, in the style of Paul Anka, and he also plays saxophone mainly for restaraunts/functions. The venue was the Emmanuel Church in Lurgan, and say what you will about churches, but they have some excellent facilities for recording this type of stuff. The sound was being recorded from the mixer using a Fostex field recorder, and we were videoing with a Canon HV20, HV30 (with 35mm adaptor) and Canon 550d. Hopefully we managed to get some decent footage, and all that’s left now is the editing. Editing…I do enjoy it, but at the same time it’s horrific. It’s so bad, I still haven’t even edited my holiday footage from Germany in the summer, or the stuff from Kerry even earlier in the year.

Media Remote

The media centre is now up and working, and hidden away in the cupboard with no apparent cabling connecting the TV and PC (apart from a solitary composite video cable, though that may not be that way for long). I bought a drill and sander from Tesco Direct to assist me with the project, and picked them up from Lurgan this morning. To hide everything I needed to drill from behind the TV into the adjacent cupboard, and for that I needed the mother-of-all drillbits (along with advice) provided by my fantastic Granda, who just so happens to be the best carpenter and general handyman ever. As I’m writing this I’m watching Arrested Development on Netflix and we also watched half of Annie Hall earlier on. Everything is working fine so far, and I managed to get hold of a decent media centre remote (one made by Dell, as shown in the picture) but thanks to a shortage of AAA batteries I’ve been relying on a mini one from Hong Kong. It is suprisingly good, and even has mouse cursor control, but the Dell easily wins the style battle. Hiding the computer has helped to reduce the noise produced, but it still needs to be damped with foam or a similar material to take the edge off. I haven’t checked the temperature yet, but there should be plenty of room for air to circulate in the cupboard.

Now that phase 1 of the project is almost complete, I don’t know what to do with myself. Most of the parts are assembled, and the only thing left is to put in the front panel USB ports. There are still a few bugs to iron out, like the shutdown problem (or lack thereof) but things should be running smoothly soon.

I’m way too tired to write any more, and I probably should head to bed, only to get up and have to do work for next week. There are other things I had planned to talk about, like the fantastic Tim Schafer adventure game Grim Fandango, and the browser based version of the original C&C, but that will have to wait for another day. Ciao!